Some Tesla Model S owners who are used to high-end luxury cars have complained about the vehicle’ interior not being up to the standards of a $80,000+ car. Andrey, a Model S owner in Moscow, was tired of complaining and took action. He completely changed the interior of his Model S to a BMW 6-series’ for about $30,000.
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Porsche announced today the green light for its first all-electric model, the Mission E concept unveiled at the Frankfurt Motor show earlier this year, for production by the end of the decade. The company will invest over $700 million to expand its assembly capacity and include the production of electric motors.
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Germany is the thirteenth government to join the International Zero-Emission Vehicle Alliance, which aims at making all passenger vehicles emission-free by 2050. The group made the announcement Thursday at the UN global climate talks in Paris.
The governments now participating in the ZEV Alliance include the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway in Europe; California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont in the United States; and Québec in Canada.
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NAIAS officials confirmed to local Detroit news that Tesla pulled out of the North American International Auto Show “at the last minute”. Tesla’s presence was confirmed on the NAIAS’ floor plan for months. The news comes while Tesla is still not allowed to sell cars in Michigan since the state government “clarified” a direct sale law in 2014 by removing one word from the bill, which now prevents Tesla from operating its own stores in the state.
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Based on registration data, Tesla delivered 225 Model S’s in Norway last month – up from 198 units in October and 202 in November 2014. The company recently ran in some troubles in Norway after Model S owners expressed concerns over the way Tesla is reporting the power output of the car, especially the Dual Motor version. Tesla is now in mediation with over 150 Model S owners in the country over these concerns.
On the margins of the UN conference on climate change in Paris, Elon Musk was at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University yesterday for a talk about what can be done to curb CO2 emissions, which he followed with a Q&A with students.
The main point Musk was trying to make during the talk was that the fundamental problem with carbon emission is that companies are currently incentivized to use fossil fuels rather than sustainable energy. He argued that to end the incentives, you need to attach a price to carbon emissions, and the best way to that is to introduce a carbon tax.
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Local news reports in Chile are stating that “senior Tesla executives” met with government officials to evaluate a partnership with state-owned mining company Codelco in order to source lithium in the country.
The agreement would presumably be to supply Tesla’s Gigafactory under-construction in Nevada.
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In his latest video, InternetDude gives us an interesting look at the Tesla Model S’ heated seats and steering wheel through an infrared camera. The features are available with the Model S’ $1,000 Subzero Weather Package, which also includes wiper blade defrosters and washer nozzle heaters.
You can watch the full video below the fold:
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Dieselgate is starting to significantly impact Volkswagen’s sales in the US. The company published its November reports this week (see below) and the company suffered a 24.72% average decrease across all models.
The all-electric e-Golf is one of the rare model bringing the average up, but sales haven’t really increased since the scandal. They delivered 472 e-Golf units in November, up from 119 during the same period last, but it was the first month of availability in 2014. For a better comparison, VW delivered 596 e-Golfs in October.
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DEFCON finally posted the entire video of the “How to Hack a Tesla Model S” presentation from the conference earlier this summer. Let me preface this by saying that Tesla already pushed OTA software updates to its fleet to fix the issues unveiled by the two security researchers, Kevin Mahaffey and Marc Rogers.
Nonetheless, it is a very interesting talk worth the watch if the security of connected cars is an issue of interest to you, which to a certain degree, it should be.
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During the weekend, Tesla quietly increased the price of the Model S in Canada by an average of 2%, presumably to adjust for the weak Canadian currency – $1 CAD = $0.75 USD at the moment.
The less expensive version of the Model S, the 70 kWh rear wheel drive, now starts at $89,100 before incentives and destination fees. A fully equipped P90D now costs $173,800 before any incentives.
Here are the Canadian prices for the different Model S drivetrain configurations from Tesla’s design studio:
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While Paris is hosting the COP21 climate change talk, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne to talk about his vision of what we can do to help the world transition to a sustainable future.
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In a recent interview with German newspaper Handelsblatt, BMW CEO Harald Krüger reiterated the company’s intention to phase out diesel models and introduce more electric vehicles in order to comply with increasingly strict emission regulations.
The CEO also commented on Tesla’s Autopilot, which he doesn’t see as the lead semi-autonomous option on the market at the moment. Of course, this comment shouldn’t come as a surprise since you rarely hear an executive admiting that a competitor’s technology is more advanced than his own company’s, but Krüger’s comments went beyond boasting BMW’s tech.
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BMW manufactures its electric vehicles, the i3 and i8, at its plant in the city of Leipzig, Germany. Yesterday, the automaker delivered 50 all-electric white i3’s to the municipality for city employees to use under 2-year leases.
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We learn through GreenCarCongress that the US Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) published a list of 10 states which are now adopting electric vehicle fees ranging from $43 to $300 to replace lost revenue from fuel taxes.
Fuel taxes at the pump have theoretically been used to finance highway maintenance, but electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids using less or no gas at all are not contributing to this fund.
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The first spy shots of the production version of the 2017 all-electric Chevy Bolt were released today via SpiedBilde and Autoblog. First impression is that the production version is quite significantly different from the concept car (as usual) unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show earlier this year. It seems to take more design queues from the Volt.
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Today Nissan released its November US sales report, which reaffirmed decreasing LEAF sales, now down 60% over November 2014. The company delivered 1,054 LEAFs in the US in November versus 2,687 during the same period last year and 1,238 last month.
November brings the year-to-date total to 15,922 units, down from 27,098 during the same period in 2014.
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According to the registration data coming in for November in European markets, Tesla delivered 157 Model S’s last month in the Netherlands – up from 145 units in October. The Netherlands continue to be an important market for Tesla. It is the second biggest European market for the company with Norway being the first.
Year-to-date, the company delivered 1,613 cars in the country, which represents a 44% increase versus the same period last year.
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According to Nasdaq’s latest short interest update, the total short position on Tesla’s stock increased to 27,367,931 shares – its highest since March 2014. The short position is almost as important as Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s own stake in the company: 28,371,342 shares or about 29% of the float.
Mitsubishi CEO Osamu Masuko talking to Automotive News confirmed that the company will launch the Outlander PHEV in the US around “mid-2016”. The plug-in hybrid version of the Outlander consistently reach the top of the best-selling lists for plug-ins in European and Asian markets where it is available, but the Japan-based automaker has been delaying a U.S. launch for quite some time now. If we are to believe CEO Osamu Masuko, 2016 might finally be the year.
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Update: A source close to the company tells us Rose is not working on Google’s car project. We are also hearing that he might have been let go at Tesla.
Robert Rose has an impressive resumé as a software engineer. He worked at HP while completing his MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oregon State University. He then developed award-winning PSP games at Sony such as Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror and Resistance: Retribution.
In 2009, he moved to California to be the lead software engineer for SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 and Dragon flight. He quickly became Director of Flight Software, a position he held until July 2014. After a brief stint at machine learning firm Vicarious, he joined Tesla last May to lead the Autopilot team into the release of v7.0 update, which enabled ‘Autosteer’ and ‘Auto Lane Change’.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Rose left Tesla right after the release of the Autopilot in October and a month later, we learn that he joined Google.
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After the success of its Formula E Championship, the FIA group announced a new race series with driverless electric cars in partnership with Kinetik. The new championship is called ‘ROBORACE’ and aims at providing a competitive platform for the autonomous driving solutions that are now being developed by automotive and tech companies.
ROBORACE will “piggyback” on the Formula E Championship with each race taking place on the same circuit right before the Formula E race. FIA and Kinetic plan for 10 teams, each with two driverless cars, to compete in 1-hour races.
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It’s no secret that Tesla’s retail strategy is inspired by Apple’s. In 2010, the automaker hired George Blankenship as VP of Store Design & Development. Blankenship was a GAP veteran who led Apple’s real estate business from 2000 to 2006 and to whom Apple Store’s early success has been largely attributed.
Blankenship retired in 2013, but apparently it wasn’t the end of the connection between the retail strategies of the two companies. We learn that earlier this month, Tesla hired the team leader of the architectural team for Apple Stores at Callison, an international architecture firm.
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